good rant: the common purpose friend group
# e i g h t e e n
Testing out a new column called good rant in which I will be ranting about something that I find to be good. This will (eventually) be a monthly bonus newsletter, even though this one is still on the regular old timeline. Still shifting things around and figuring out what I want to do and maybe something like this might be behind a paywall? Who knows! I hate money. So enjoy this shorter and hopefully a little sweeter content than usual.
My first good rant is going to be about specific groups of people that are in our lives for a somewhat brief amount of time. This is a group that bonded over something and now home to them is remembering that thing. These are usually friend groups outside of your core group- though sometimes they can intersect. But these particular groups have bonded through working together or working on something together, groups that meet because of a certain purpose or simply groups that had one common goal which brought them all together. And I love them. I’ve recently caught up with some friends from these groups and it felt nice and good so I would like to rant about how important these groups are and give some attention to them since they usually go unnoticed since they were never the really dominant party in your life.
The most prominent group of friends like this for me is the group of women I worked with at Victoria’s Secret from 2006-2010. I’ve never bonded more with a group of people than I did with these women and our never ending struggle to fold thousands of pairs of underwear according to ROY G. BIV. Anytime VS is in the news these days I run straight to Facebook because inevitability one of these women is posting about whatever bad news has come from that wretched place and we can once again come together like old times and roast the hell out of the company. We are able to speak in a language only we know because we learned that language through spending overnights at the store trying to fit bras onto mannequins and asking Miss Debbie in the stockroom if we had anymore 36C Very Sexy Bras in nude or black (the customer will take either or both if we have them). I hated working retail but I loved working with these women. They shaped my early twenties in such a specific way that it’s hard to imagine my life without them even though I haven’t seen many of them in over a decade. We did hang out here and there outside of the pink VS floor but for the most part our bond was constructed through eye rolling how to sell whatever $60 padded bra VS was deeming revolutionary at the time and causing irreparable damage to our olfactory nerves from living in the scented wake of Love Spell being sprayed constantly around us.
Another group that I love and miss is my book club that ran from 2014-2016. We met once every other month, talked about books, caught up on major life events, gossiped about people we didn’t know and then I didn’t see them for another 6 weeks. It was bliss. Again just a group of people brought together for a common purpose who don’t need to be each other’s ride or dies but just to simply vibe with each other on a Friday night. I only became apart of this book club because I randomly met one of the girls at a dinner who was starting a book club and needed members so all my memories of those ladies are solely tied to books and snacks. Bliss!!
A group that has overlapped the core group and the common theme group was my friend group from youth group. I caught up with one of them recently and I never knew how much it meant to me to talk to someone from that experience rather than trying to talk to someone about that experience. As much as I am still understanding all my religious trauma, there is just something about being able to lock in on a core experience without having to explain it and being allowed to sit in the bad thing knowing the full reality of it won’t be news to the other person. Sometimes I get tired of explaining that my particular church spoke in tongues or use terminology like being “slain in the spirit” with other people raised religious, but I do find a release in being able to remember these experiences with people who stood next to me at the church camp altar or knew the weight of having to go to chapel three times a week in order to graduate college. It’s comfort in the wake of a damaging experience and only the attending parties really can understand the depth of it.
Okay back to nicer stuff- gonna rant about the group text thread. Again usually started with a common purpose in mind but my favorite buzz on my phone usually comes from one of my baseball chats where we can simply send a meme of Dodger Cody Bellinger using Flonase and everyone instantly gets it. The common purpose friend group turned common purpose group thread is a treasure within your messages and I find no greater joy then when the thread gets to takes off. It’s not a thread with any life altering information or experiences but just a thread to unite people over a particular thing. Just fun stuff especially during these unfun times.
I do think that the nostalgia high we get from groups like these are because we were initially introduced to friend groups this way. Middle and high school we sectioned off by interests/age/lifestyle so remembering a group of people from a certain experience is because we miss doing that play together or running that hilly cross country meet or even just working on the same English project together. The commonality we shared in high school formed bits of who we are today- the good, bad, terrible and fun bits. Looking back the experience is only sacred to those who lived it and many times it might have been a fleeting endeavor but overall it does stick with you in a unique way.
No one will ever understand your experience quite like the people who formed your experience. I value and love all the groups of people I’ve been able to share my time with. Even looking back at the bad times, the release you get being able to say “that was fucked up” to someone who knows is unmatched. “Remember when…” is soothing even if it’s alleviating a once painful situation. I will never work for VS again but I miss being able to be in the same room as those girls and am glad we have been able to peripherally stay in touch after all these years. My book club is now scattered across the country but I feel lucky to have once shared half read books with them over full glasses of wine. And as far as youth group goes, as damaging as it was at least we have each other to turn to these days to all collectively sigh remembering our youth pastor once completely lost his shit because someone played him Nelly’s Hot In Herre on the radio and he spent almost a full youth group service yelling at us about the dangers of taking off all our clothes.
re: what’s going on
Here are two things I read this week that I enjoyed: this Stevie Nicks interview and this Bob Odenkirk profile. I got about 75% into The Cut article about Vibe Shifts before I just waived my hand saying yeah I get it, so there’s that for popular media.
This TikTok that I now open each day with as a meditation.
I went to The Getty a few weeks ago with my LA mom and I forgot you can just do things like that here in LA. I have made it a goal of mine to do more things like that so this was a good start. Also here is some film from that day.
Okay thank you for reading! Let me know any comments/questions/thoughts. See ya in two weeks, baby :)